McCain and Republican Foreign Policy

Jonathan Chait is mostly right about John McCain and wrong about the Republican Party:

The basic way to understand McCain is that neoconservative foreign policy is his ideological core. Everything else about his ideology can shift radically depending on his ambitions, circumstances, and whom he’s most angry with at any given moment. He favored immigration reform under George W. Bush, abandoned it to refashion himself as a “build the dang fence” border hawk, and, in the wake of last November, embraced it again. He fashioned himself as a modern Teddy Roosevelt environmentalist crusader during his anti-Bush phase, sponsored a cap and trade bill, but decided to run as a “drill here, drill now” conservative in 2008, abandoning his own cap and trade plan once Obama tried to pass it.

But the foreign policy hawkishness has remained constant. And the foreign policy hawks have found themselves the biggest losers in the GOP’s postelection ideological restructuring [bold mine-DL].

If you have no idea what this last sentence refers to, you’re not alone. Foreign policy hawks have escaped mostly unscathed from Republican post-2012 recriminations, just as they escaped post-2006 and post-2008 attempts to identify where the party went wrong. Virtually every other conservative faction has fared worse. Immigration restrictionists have been told in no uncertain terms that they are dooming the party’s political fortunes, social conservatives are serving as the traditional post-election scapegoat for Republican losses, and even anti-tax conservatives have suffered some setbacks in the months since the election. By contrast, foreign policy hawks seem not to have lost much ground at all.

Chait is right to say that hawkish foreign policy has been the one constant in McCain’s career for most of the last twenty years. It seems to be one of the main things that motivates him. Other than immigration and campaign finance reform, I can’t of any issues that he has identified with more closely than his constant agitation for military interventions and largely uncritical defense of an ever-increasing Pentagon budget. As Chait notes, McCain has on occasion been willing to pander a little to conservative concerns on immigration when it suits his intra-party political needs, but McCain has not done that on foreign policy and national security issues ever since he adopted neoconservative foreign policy ideas starting in the mid-’90s.

On foreign policy issues, McCain’s views still prevail among most elected Republicans, and they are regularly echoed by conservative pundits and analysts. The discussion among most Republicans and movement conservatives on the tenth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq was between those that thought the war was a tremendous success and those that thought it was a basically sound policy that had a few setbacks. Every Republican member of the Foreign Relations Committee except Rand Paul approved the Menendez-Corker bill, which means that they all voted with McCain. Compared to this, sequestration is a sideshow.

The best way to understand McCain’s fits of pique directed against members of his own party on anything other than foreign policy is to consider what gets him the most and the most positive media coverage.

I actually would disagree with you that the Rs neocons foreign policy while not losing in Washington but they are falling elsewhere. Rand Paul polls higher than HRC than Rubrio does in Iowa already suggesting that he is making his mark in 2016 primaries. If Iowa and NH are still the first two primaries, I suspect Rand actually has a chance to win both. (Although Rand speaking up immigration reform is CYA excuses of not voting for it. The fence is not big enough.)

It may be no more complicated than that prodigeous bellicosity gets him the most attention. Reliably. Doesn’t say much for the MSM. The sooner they toss him over the side, the better off the GOP will be. May be something in that, too.

I am not sure hawkish foreign policy is actually winning out. For one thing,only three members of the committee voted against the amendment(and one of them is Paul). Secondly,who,except for the three amigo’s(McCain,Graham and Ayotte)are really clamoring for much in Syria? Most Republicans are not too focused on foreign policy(nor are most Democrats).

The policy–”more belligerence, all the time!”–has been the GOP’s ticket to electoral success since we “lost” China.

But from whence comes the emotion that McCain embodies so well?

Vietnam.

It remains the watershed moment for McCain, the Weekly Standard crowd, the Reagan worshipers . . . and between all of them, that’s the GOP establishment, and they pass their sense of anger, resentment and betrayal on–as best they can–to the younger generation.

It’s worth analyzing the hawkish mentality further. It’s certainly aggressive and paranoid in extreme cases, but some of its roots are also strength and nobility. I am reminded of Gibbon’s thesis that loss of civic and martial virtue led to the downfall of Rome, an idea I find compelling. One fact may be indisputable, that Roman power was expanded by imperial hawks. That power almost certainly rested on genuine civic virtues. The question is, are hawks merely parasites on the virtuous body politic, who, drunk with power and passion for the strength of their people, propel them toward over-extension and eventual exhaustion and failure? Or is the hawkish mentality an integral component of virtuous living, full stop? I tend to agree with the first one more than the second, but also know from personal experience that the second is undoubtedly true. The martial, uncompromising pursuit of idealism that hawks embody is a key element of a successful personality. So maybe this is merely the human tragedy, how our greatest successes contain the seeds of their undoing. Of course none of this invalidates the article’s critiques, which I endorse. The McCain type hawkishness you’re talking about, in fact, is a lack of self-control, an aggressiveness untamed by moderating virtues.

“…they pass their sense of anger, resentment and betrayal on–as best they can–to the younger generation…”

Yes, but behind this “BS for the Bubbas” lurks the military-industrial-financial complex, with its well-oiled lobbyists funnelling millions to elected officials and with its subsidiaries in every congressional district.

Indeed, you’re right. Lots of money to be made from war. And a bunch of it gets diverted to the think tanks that develop the positions that get cycled through the pro-war print vectors, that show up in the speeches and get repeated on the talk shows, and eventually get written on the bathroom stalls (ironically) in Kandahar and Mosul.

That’s why the Danielle Pletkas of the world–even if they can’t find much of an audience now and again–will never lack for salary. Tomorrow is always another day, and when it comes, they’ll be ready.

What, on the other hand, are the instruments of peace? Where are they manufactured?

Charlieford – - Re: “instruments of peace”. How many improvements to light-rail systems, trolly systems, etc etc in hundreds of American cities, could have been financed with the hundreds of billions of dollars Obama has squandered on the quagmire in Afghanistan?